I wonder if it’s just 'cus Nvidia isn’t being talked about much. “AI” is the buzzword, the There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills of this bubble. Hardware is the picks and shovels, where the real cash is being made. If they’re just training this on scrapping text from the web, that’s an easy fact to overlook.
So a bit like how thematic ETFs are usually not a good investment, because they follow the hype and jump on the bandwagon at a point in time where prices have already run up?
It’s pretty similar, yeah. A lot of casual investing (and even a worrying amount of professional investing) focuses too much on changes in exchange-value while overlooking use-vale. Exchange-value fluctuates with market trends, with how people feel about something and what they are willing to trade to have it. Use-value is sort of like the ‘floor’ – it’s the material value of something, its practical use.
At the moment, the computer programmes that get called “AI” have an exchange value that almost certainly exceeds their actual use-value (which is still hazy at the moment; this stuff is pretty new). A hardware company like NVIDIA really benefits from this, because it drives up the exchange value of their computer chips, which already have an established use-value. There’s a risk here, though. At the moment, demand for chips is high and they are producing as much as they can to meet it. If it eventually turns out the use for “AI” is significantly less than its exchange value, they’ll find themselves producing more chips than people actually need.
